On a lighter note, some of the thesis students here at Wurster Hall went stir crazy over Spring Break and have been developing a trove of Architectural LOLCATS. You are welcome to join us and submit your own Architectural LOLCAT at the following tumblr page, and suggest your own captions!

Maru gets stuck in the Philip Johnson's Glass House

Le Kittenusier'

The Birds Nest by Purrzog and deMeowron

Office for Meow Architecture (OMA) Seattle Kitten Library

Paul Rudolph's brutal Cat and Architecture Building at Yale

Catteus Woods - Catnip Free Zone 1990

Archigram's - Walking Kitty

Mies Van der Meow strikes again

St Marys Cats - Tokyo

SANAA Kitty Box

The Classic Falling Kittens

Mario Botta's SF MeOwMA

Institute of Catemporary Art - Diller, Scofidio and Renfro

The Purrrrr Building - Diller, Scofidio and Renfro

Wurster Scratching Post, our home sweet home

Libeskitten finds out the hard way.

Kittens Pavillion - Shanghai Expo 2010

Nelson Atkin Meowseum - Steven Holl

Sendai MediaCat - Toyo Ito

Sanaa - Rolex Purrrrning Center

Something these cats can really appreciate

Coop Himmel(m)eow

NBBJ's adorable basket of kittens

Rem Koolpaws

Louis Kittahn

Purrruit Igoe

La Purrrette

The Purrrrthenon

The Leaning Meower of Pisa

K.T. Escher's Impossible Staircases

Thermeow Vals - Peter Zumthor

The Purrrgenheim

Kickboxing Kitty in Prague permanently deforms elastic curtain walled building.

I have been researching optimization methods in architecture and I was delighted to learn about a few high profile projects that have utilized some fantastic algorithms to assist in the realization of complex forms. Multi-Objective Optimization or Multi-Criteria Design Optimization (MCDA)...

Astana Library Optimization

Living Light Structural Optimization

Villa Savoye Generator

image : Philip Dujardin/Domus Coming to you live from the 10th floor of Wurster Hall in beautiful Berkeley, California tonight the Monographs and Manifestos seminar will be broadcast in streaming video with chatroom. We invite you to take a look at our blog - with some bloglike ramblings...

An incredible symposium this weekend at Berkeley, the inaugural Studio One Symposium organized by Prof. Nicholas deMonchaux. The event was broken up into two days, first an evening lecture by Mark Smout of Smout Allen known for their 'Retreating Village' project with seductive...

Eco-Sniper cited by Liam Young (Warning.)

from the symposium website...  "The Inaugural Studio One Symposium will be held February 10-11, 2012. Focusing on the studio's themes of architectural agency at an ecological and infrastrucutral scale, the symposium will bring together a global roster of influential designers and thinkers...

Working within a parametric interface with a genetic algorithm solver has been a real treat over the past year, thanks to Galapagos. The integration of simulation engines with the parametric interface has enabled much discovery and introspection into the possibilities that such a workflow could...

Solar Optimization from Constrained Parametric Model

Last night, Berkeley CED Students set up camp in sovereign air space in response to the brutal police action last week against non-violent protesters. The cost of tuition continues to rise at UC and there have been a series of actions in solidarity with the Occupy movement and in response to the...

Occupy Cal - CED Students set up camp.

Police beating people armed with cameras.

Awesome tests done by Anthony Gianinni and Pablo Zunzunegui in the Jordi Truco studio next door... interactive adaptive components driven by sensors. These are two unit tests for an aggregated structure that will be built at the end of the semester. Non-Functional Prototype Actuation Test...

Bryan Allen just returned from visiting the ruins of Chernobyl, follow his intriguing explorations of 'Post Industrial Latent Space' at his blog, updated frequently with great pictures. Bryan is one of two winners of the Branner Fellowship given by the UC Berkeley CED in 2010, the 2011 winners...

Beautiful thesis projects abound at the presentations last Friday... a busy semester coming to a close giving way to a promising Summer and a formal beginning of my own thesis. My work this semester has focused on becoming literate in various scripting languages and diving deeper into the...

My studio is taking part in the Vertical Cities Asia competition this semester. This competition asks us to design a city for 100,000 on a 1km by 1km space in Chengdu, China... an industrial city in central China with a population near 12 million. This rapidly urbanizing area poses a great set of...

During my first semester at Berkeley (M. Arch Option 2), I learned a great deal about the program that I would like to share with you. Berkeley is undergoing a shift of thought that makes it difficult to pin down exactly what the school's pedagogical aims may be. The new chair of the architecture...

Since my last post I've found a house in Berkeley. This weekend we unloaded the POD into the new house and threw a small party to celebrate that achievement. I met and re-acquainted myself with some of the Option III students who are taking the Summer Program, they are all very promising and I'm...

Since my last post, I've become a resident of California, let me tell you a little about what that's like. I live in Aliso Viejo. It's a planned community that was incorporated 20 years ago from Laguna Beach. I'm 3 miles from the Pacific and it's all nature preserve from here to there, you can...

Please hold on, please set luggage cart break to on. (SFO) T-27 days until I leave Virginia, I thought I would get a jump on the school blog. The past two months have been a whirlwind of travel and exploration, visiting potential grad schools, job interviews, a wedding, a funeral, goodbyes...